Jeffrey Alan Payne - Doczine

I wish I had the call on speaker phone; my roommates would have been rolling around inhysterics when they heard his name. “Oh hi,” I stammered.“Listen, we have an opening now at the station. It’s overnights. The salary is onehundred and eighty dollars a week. Midnight till six, and you get Sundays off.”Oh my! How could I refuse that? Plus, I would be spending those hours of solitude on awarehouse lined street in a small industrial southern town. I wouldn’t fit in, and the onlypeople I would know are my mother, a perennially smiling guy with perfect hair and aporn star’s name, and a pompous social pariah with hygiene issues.“Sounds good,” was my reply, “When do I start?”My start date was to be in ten days. I finally had a job in radio, such as it was. My firstmove was to call my mother, who informed me that my father had possession of somesavings bonds that I had accrued throughout my childhood.Back in the sixties and seventies, it was a less flamboyant, more practical anduncomplicated era. You worked, you saved money, you bought a house, you retired.The stock market was for a different kind of person than uninitiated blue collar familieslike us.In decades to come, savings bonds would be largely regarded as having similar status tomarital sex. You don’t end up receiving much interest, but it’s nice to know you’ve gotsomething. I immediately contacted my father.It turned out to be about one thousand dollars. I bought one of those old hippieemblematic cargo vans with shag carpeting on every interior surface and packed up mybelongings, less my trophy waterbed. I sold that to my roommate, assuring him that ithad been very “lucky” for me, a rather disturbing image for the buyer after I thoughtabout it. At six in the morning, on a cold snowy Saturday in the middle of January, I leftfor Tennessee to pursue a new set of dreams. At least the weather would be milder thanMichigan’s.There were no goodbyes, since my roommates considered my departure a reason tothrow a party, the night before. They were all obviously too hung over to wake up.Either that or they were staring at the person lying next to them, wondering what kind of“busy day” they could pretend to have, so their dalliance would leave before they had tobuy them breakfast. I never saw any of them again, and they had been my closepersonal world for the better part of five years.I made the twelve hour trip, stopping several times to stretch my legs and to test the ideathat I might get picked up by some beautiful bohemian girl at a rest stop. She would bea natural beauty, wearing a sheer sundress and traveling barefoot and underwear-less.What I got instead was tapped on the foot by the guy in the next bathroom stall, at a restarea in Ohio. I scurried out of that particular roadside retreat as soon as I could get tothe van, but otherwise meandered down I-75 with the urgency of a man going to thegallows on a “premeditated bestiality causing death” conviction.19